Did Donald Trump Blab Classified Info On Fox News?

Last night, in his desperate efforts to wriggle out of his wiretapping lie, Donald Trump tried to justify it by blabbing about what should have been classified information, if it was true, about the CIA getting hacked.

In the same conversation in which Trump tried to blame Bret Baier for his own lie about having been wiretapped by President Barack Obama, host Tucker Carlson asked Trump why he hadn’t gone to the intelligence agencies, which he’s in charge of, to get proof of the wiretap claim. Ironically, Trump said it was because he was being protective of them.

TRUMP: Because I don’t want to do anything that’s going to violate any strength of an agency. You know, we have enough problems.

And then in his next sentences, he did exactly that.

TRUMP: And, by the way, with the CIA, I just want people to know. The CIA was hacked and a lot of things taken.That was during the Obama years. That was not during us. That was during the Obama situation. Mike Pompeo is there now and doing a fantastic job.

In Trump’s petulant zeal to continue smearing his far-morepopular predecessor as lax on security, Trump seems to have done what he decries in others: he leaked classified information, himself. Either that or he lied. Today, the Democratic ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, issued a blistering condemnation in response.

Acknowledging that Trump has the “power to declassify whatever he wants,” Schiff blasted Trump’s carelessness with classified information and noted that if anyone else had said what he said, it would have been a “leak”:

In his effort to once again blame Obama, the President appears to have discussed something that, if true and accurate, would otherwise be considered classified information.

It would be one thing if the President’s statement were the product of intelligence community discussion and a purposeful decision to disclose information to the public, but that is unlikely to be the case. The President has the power to declassify whatever he wants, but this should be done as the product of thoughtful consideration and with intense input from any agency affected. For anyone else to do what the President may have done, would constitute what he deplores as “leaks.”

As MSNBC’s Steve Benen wrote, Trump was probably referring to a Wikileaks release of documents allegedly obtained from the CIA. But the CIA has refused to confirm the authenticity the documents, saying, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

And let’s not forget that, if authentic, the Wikileaks documents very likely were obtained by Russian agents.

Trump is such a liar it’s pathetic. He never read the NYT on Jan. 20. He saw the story from Levin that morning and ran with it as fact. He’s also trying to convince people he put quotes around a word in a tweet with something in mind? Wow.